Differentiation is always a pre-condition for achieving market advantage. You must do something differently from your competitors to provide certain consumers with a good reason for preferring you. Only the things that you do differently from your competitors comprise your competitive strategy. Same same, but different, matters.
Rana
Filed under Be unique
I had an intense discussion with my grandfather yesterday. We came to the conclusion that individuality , from the seventeenth century on, and in the state or quality of being an individual, indicates separateness. But now, being a human with thoughts, emotions, own needs, goals and desires is nothing that differs you from the others you find different. Not in the eyes of the observer. Feelings of individuality is therefor very personal and relative and it says far more about your selfimage than the actual footprints you have had on the world around you. You might think you, and your name with it, is special, but no one reacts more to your name than yourself. If you are to differ from all the rest of the individuals, especially from those with the same name as you, you really can’t just be different in some aspects and count that as a special characteristic feature only for you. You probably got your inspiration for those characteristic features you claim by someone, somewhere. You either are a rerun, or if you are good enough, you will be imitated. Bottom line, you are an individual, like everybody else. Nothing lifts you above others but your own mental world.
The same thing goes for brands. They are all special and unique. But you mix them up, because the companies behind the brands know more about their own uniqueness than you do. And you are the consumer. Now, I’ve seen a lot of naming of companies and products over the years that are driven by either the entrepreneur culture- heavy, philosophical and artistic names, or the engineer culture – clumsy, meaningless, and/or technical names. However, in situations where a company is just as comparable as another it matters how you present your individuality. More than often, the key product is not what separates brands from each other, and it certainly isn’t the brand name or logo. It is the off-line, off-core and non relevant way of presentation.
Here is an example, in Canada, there is a news company which according to no lesser authority than Time Magazine “offers the best international coverage this side of the BBC”. The company broadcasts fresh news and current events programs to more than 172 countries daily on the Internet and reaches a weekly television audience of 34 Million only in US, many more million viewers in Australia, UK and around Europe. The news company is also available in over 1.4 million hotels rooms as V.O.D and daily accessable to wireless mobile phones. Their digital products are cable and satellite-ready, and available for licensing in English, Spanish and French language distribution. The premium price is high but they have become extremely popular, even though they only broadcast news, as so many other news companies. The company’s name is Nakedt News ´The channel with nothing to hide`and covers business, politics, entertainment and sport. What makes them special? Their anchors, wellknowledgble women, are all naked.
Some might say it is extreme, shameful and completely irrelevant to news companies. It’s true. But they are no reruns of anything, and no one will ever think of imitating them. They claimed a guaranteed space without competitors by choosing a differentiation with no connection to the core benefit of a news company what so ever.
Individuality is not about being different inside the norm. It’s about wanting something so bad, that you chose to stand outside. And for that, you need to offer something completely new. Because seriously, nothing of substance really differs you and your company from all those others in the same industry, offering the exact same core benefits that the consumer already expects to get.
Just think of Apple. Apple is a part of my life. No longer as a company or brand that offers me useful products which I repay by staying loyal. I also use Apple as a show-piece, it fits my design interested lifestyle. I have to many Apple products in my home to be able to count them in a hurry. While, the function of a computer has nothing to do with design really. But since Apple chose to stand outside the norm of what a computer or software should or could offer, no one can really imitate them.
Rana
Filed under Be unique
The pharmaceutical industry’s way of anticipating, and building insurance against, the coming era of government-run health care in United States reminds me of the mergers and acquisitions from earlier this spring. Of course, pharmaceutical companies most be feeling the need to be more diversified beyond prescription drugs, and everything from Pfizer’s (PFE) acquisition of Wyeth, Merck’s (MRK) purchase of Schering-Plough and Genentech’s (DNA) deal with Roche all made headlines for their potential to help the resulting entities reduce costs and add new, promising drugs to company pipelines. I am however genuine interested in knowing if the board members in and between these mergers actually optimize the potential of market growth or not. We know that Pfizer, itself being a product of series of mergers with the buy of Warner-Lambert and later Pharmacia, is in a global effort to refashion a more consumer appealing Pfizer company brand. I for one am excited, since I haven’t seen a significant new corporate brand launch at a major pharma house since the launch of AztraZeneca and Novartis brands. In the short-term, corporate rebranding will likely show it self as an increased level of corporate-level marketing and promotion to support efforts to ‘brand the merger’, as much as to ‘rebrand the company’, in the eyes of customers and investors. Over the longer-term, however, I guess a philosophical shift among marketer leaders in the industry will find more productive ways to leverage the corporate brand to a broad suite of enterprise offerings and services that are increasingly the basis of differentiation amongst product brands. But I can’t help to think whether big pharmaceutical companies may actually gain more from collaborating on research and development than from mega mergers. For some reason, collaborations on research and development – as opposed to takeovers – are quiet agreements with little media attention. But it is here where the corporations actually get creative. Merck and AstraZeneca (AZN) combined two of their leading pipeline products to develop an innovative cancer therapy, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Concert Pharmaceuticals pooled pipeline assets in part to distribute risk, and Pfizer and GSK combined their HIV pipelines and marketed products into a joint venture to increase their chances of success. These deals represent new, promising ways to prove commitments, and as a strategist, I wonder why these agreements are not brand promoted on a higher level. The company brands would only benefit showing of its deepened relationship with rivals, and doing so by providing innovative platforms to retain product brand equity beyond product patent exclusivity. This is social marketing, the real future of the industry but unfortunately there seem to be a lack of insight of what is really happening and why it shouldn’t be kept away from the public light. And this is in a time when pharmaceutical branding has become so crucial to creating distinctions in the mind of patients as well as doctors.
Rana
Filed under Be unique
I find it quite boresome that this hybrid about social media is still kept so shallow within some executive groups. The mistake many people make is that they dive into the social media pool without a strategy. They believe that social media is a panacea to solve all problems. Social media is simply a tool and it doesn’t replace marketing fundamentals. The evolution of the web is taking a similar path to other media. Initially, businesses thought of the web as print media. Companies simply posted their datasheets online. It was a static, flat media much like a newspaper. Social media is now allowing businesses to think of the web as being a place for “conversations”. It is a dynamic, two-way media for real-time interaction. If we think of it in terms of “print media” versus “conversations”, it helps put this discussion into context.
I have said this at least a thousand times. The most important step businesses need to take when looking at social media is to establish an objective. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to understand your customer’s requirements? Do you want to promote your products? Do you want to enhance your brand? This will define how you use social media. Social media should not be a stand-alone campaign, but rather a component of your larger marketing programs. Again, this is a tool that should be integrated into your larger marketing efforts. Social media is so much more than just a Facebook page or hiring someone to post Twitts. I feel I need to broaden some horizons.
Social media is not social marketing. These are two different subjects. Social media is called such because of the qualities of the actual media. It is designed to be disseminated through interaction, thereby the use of word, and was created by using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. In the case of Social media, Internet and web-based technologies is used for to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into media dialogues (many to many). The idea behind this supports the democratization of knowledge and information, allowing and firmly transforming people from being content consumers into becoming content producers. But as we all know, not all producers, being it on the movie screen or through social media, have actually something fruitful to say. But since Social media is relatively inexpensive it is of course acceccable to everyone and so the media space is no longer only for corporations and goverments to claim. Andrew Keen, a fun guy to follow at thegreatseduction.com by the way, criticizes social media in his book The Cult of the Amateur, writing, “Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.”
I think he sums it up quite well. Now, of course, because of all the frensi regarding Social media everywhere, pharmaceutical companies, just as any other industry, is hurrying to catch up.
Now before I continue, how does social media differ from social marketing? First of all, whenever the word marketing is used, remember that the primary focus is on the consumer – on learning what people want and need rather than trying to persuade them to buy what a company happen to be producing. Marketing talks to the consumer, not about the product. Just like with commercial marketing the planning process takes this consumer focus into account by addressing the elements of the marketing mix. This refers to decisions about 1) the conception of a Product, 2) Price (not only dollars but also such as time or effort requested by the consumer), 3) Place (Distribution), and 4) Promotion. These are often called the “Four Ps” of marketing. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society. This technique has been used extensively in international health programs, especially for contraceptives and oral rehydration therapy (ORT), and is being used with more frequency in North America for such diverse topics as drug abuse, heart disease and organ donation. In its most general sense, Social Marketing is a new way of thinking about some very old human endeavours. As long as there have been social systems, there have been attempts to inform, persuade, influence, motivate, to gain acceptance for new adherents to certain sets of ideas, to promote causes and to win over particular groups, to reinforce behaviour or to change it — whether by favour, argument or force. Social Marketing has deep roots in religion, in politics, in education, and even, to a degree, in military strategy. It also has intellectual roots in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, communication theory and anthropology. Its practical roots stem from disciplines such as advertising, public relations and market research, as well as to the work and experience of social activists, advocacy groups and community organizers.
As you must have understood by now, combining social marketing with social media will mean effectiveness in fostering sustainable behaviour. Healthcare companies around the world are exploiting the social marketing-building nature with the help of social media websites, to engage like-minded Internet users – and some are achieving significant results. Social media in never really the goal. It is however a multifunctional tool. For example, Abbott Laboratories’ use of Facebook is a part of a major communications programme that includes a partnership with Channel One News. And so in this case the Facebook page is just one part of what is a significant international campaign by Abbott Laboratories that integrates online and offline media, aimed, I am sure, to some sort of demonstrating of Abbott’s long-term commitment to the science laboratory profession.
What does this achieve? Well for one thing the Facebook page provides Abbott Laboratories with a platform for telling people in its network of stakeholders (who have identified themselves as ‘fans’) immediately about updates and ideas. This is truly engaging stakeholders who are joined by a common interest in laboratory science. Further, I am sure traffic is also driven to Abbott’s campaign websites labsarevital.com and labsciencecareers.com. In turn, Pfizer in involved with A Healthier World, a series that explores issues of global health, through podcasts. Each podcast episode is approximately two minutes in length and offers global health news and information gathered from over 100 sources, including the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Medical Association, World Health Organization, Mayo Clinic, and other prestigious organizations and universities. This is Social marketing, with the usage of Social media.
Rana
Filed under Be social
New products are the lifeblood of any biopharma company and organizations are increasingly under pressure to deliver effective products in shorter time frames. As development pressures have grown, leading companies have turned to the New Product Planning function to seed the development process with actionable insights across all the phases of product commercialization. The structure, activities, and resources of New Product Planning (NPP) groups are critical to focusing new product development and optimizing product portfolios. The structure and roles of NPP groups as well as the full set of activities that NPP groups perform across the development cycle is however just as important as the existance ot the groups, if not more so. For example, involving NPP earlier in the development process would speed decision-making and allow low-value projects to be prune. For this, NPP needs to be part of the core team of the company, that is with R&D and Clinical, for to have an honest go at shaping the product development.
Rana
Filed under Mixed and blended
Can a prescription drug be a branded product?
Professor Aaker defines a brand as a,
“…distinguishing name and/or symbol (such as a logo, trademark, or package design) intended to identify the goods or services of either one seller or a group of sellers, and to differentiate those goods or services from those of competitors. A brand thus signals to the consumer the source of the product, and protects both the consumer and the producer from competitors who would attempt to provide products that appear to be identical.”
Without even going further, do pharmaceutical products even qualify to create and develop brand equity? Professor Aaker define the major components of brand equity as: brand loyalty, brand awareness, perceived quality, and brand associations. What brand is the core for pharmaceutical companies though, since many consumers are more familiar with product names than company names.
Rana
Filed under Mixed and blended
It has already been six years, August of 2003, since the FDA eased their regulations on the advertising and promotion that has come to be known as direct-to-consumer, DTC. Since then, there has been a fanatical search for the perfect branding model for prescription pharmaceuticals. Which is understandable of course, when one single product can bring together several billion dollars a year in sales, who wouldn’t want to be the finder of the Holy Grail.
When looking for pharmaceutical companies budgets and spending I found a new report on the CBO, Congressional Budget Office. According to the report, “ Promotional Spending for Prescription Drugs” find it here
“Pharmaceutical manufacturers tend to spend more, on average, on DTC advertising for drugs that have few or no direct competitors (meaning there are few other drugs that treat the same condition using the same mechanism) than on products with numerous alternatives. Excluding some classes of drugs with the highest-selling and most advertised drugs — where a drug’s potential market size might overwhelm other factors in setting a marketing plan — the data analyzed by CBO show that average spending per drug on DTC advertising generally declines as the number of competitors in the same class increases (see Figure below). When a class includes more drugs, pharmaceutical manufacturers tend to spend less, on average, on DTC advertising because the benefits of that advertising (higher sales) may be diffused among the other drugs in the class.”
This thinking means that if you promote a drug having competitors, you are contributing to lift the category of your drug, and not necessarily your product. Which in turn means that newly enlightened consumers will be prescribed with other competitor’s drugs just as likely to be prescribed with your drug. A monopoly claims the difference, and that is why a monopoly would be willing to spend more money on advertising than a company with rivals. Of course, higher prices can be charged during a monopoly period since there is no competition but it will also remarkably reduce the risk of being snatched up by other competing drugs in the class.
Now, in recent years, U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies have launched fewer products per year (10-15 for the top 20 companies combined compared to 20-30 launches prior to 2002). Why is this, when the playground is more open than before? It looks like the need for pharmaceutical companies to adopt to savvy marketing tactics has somewhat handicapped than developed. To drive blockbuster product launches and produce continuous success throughout the product’s lifecycle you would think should be easier now when research and development groups are no longer alone in driving the value of a new product. Sales and marketing are deserved teams in the process of a product’s success. Surely, a strategic and savvy long-term planning would shape a product’s true market potential and dramatically increase its lifetime economic value.
However, there are many pieces of the puzzle which, when joined, prepare a product to achieve optimal commercial potential: thought leader advice, trial strategy and pharmacoeconomic outcomes all work to create a balance between clinical and commercial development. But preparing a drug for launch must be in conjunction with key activities for to prepare the market for to accept the drug. There are many lessons for marketing strategies to be learned from public relations, advocacy, competitive intelligence and payer groups.
The language development between pharmaceutical companies and ad agencies is quite remarkably fun to follow. The two industries is slowly getting to know each other and what has happened during these six years, amongst other things, is that benchmark companies has increasingly allocated more marketing dollars for market research, health outcomes studies and pricing studies. Also aligning cross-functional teams, structures and processes to optimize speed to market penetration has become increasingly popular during these six years. And for some time now, we have been overwhelmed with the frenzy over social media. We have all understood that the study, can also be translated to common sense of exposure, of social media is important because it is changing the rules of marketing forever and we have all seen the economy give the person more and more power. But now what? Will an Advil poke me if my Facebook status reveals that I am suffering from a headache?
For the coming six years, I look forward to following pharmaceutical companies interaction with the strategic world of branding and advertising. I call it Pharming as a mix of pharmaceutical branding, as branders and adders both need to better understand the culture of drugs to better sell it. They simple need to focus on their pharming insights and skills. There is a shift in the branding model ahead, and it is about building sustainable brand equity in a commoditized market.
Rana
Filed under Pharmaceutical company reports
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